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SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 





SELF-TRAINING 


BY 


A. H. McNEILE, D 


REGIUS PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF 
DUBLIN; FELLOW OF SIDNEY SUSSEX COLLEGE, 
CAMBRIDGE; AUTHOR OF “CONCERNING 
CHRIST,” “SELF-TRAINING IN 
MEDITATION,” ETC. 





“Despise not thy prayer, for He to whom thou prayest 
, despiseth it not.” f 
S. BERNARD. 





D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
NEW YORK ae x MCMXXVI 


COPYRIGHT, 1926, By 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


PREFACE 


In the turmoil of our surface life there is a 
multitude of men and women who would give 
anything to be able to look through it and see 
God. Many of them pray, but seldom feel that 
they are doing something real. They cannot 
launch out into the deep, and let down their 
nets for a draught from the ocean of Reality. 
Prayer is to them a religious duty rather than a 
religious experience. 

It is to such that these suggestions are of- 
fered. For the deepening consciousness of 
the Reality of prayer is one of the first es- 
sentials of a deepening Christianity. True 
prayer is not simply a means by which we can 
make ourselves “good enough to go to Heaven,” 
but a means by which we can put ourselves 
and the world around us into touch with God. 
‘And therefore without it all schemes for the 
lifting up of mankind are schemes with God 
left out; which will fail in the long run as 
they have always failed. It is possible that 


some of those who read these chapters have 
Vv 


vi PREFACE 


in the past been able to get into touch with 
Reality in their prayers, but that they are 
conscious of having lost ground again. Not 
that their prayers are fewer but that they are 
less alive. They have allowed themselves, that 
is, to get a little out of practice, and to be con- 
tent with prayers that are less alive. If so, they 
might find it a help to read this little manual 
for self-training once more, and to use its sug- 
gestions, as they would use exercises in a book 
of music, as material for fresh and determined 
practice. 
A. H. McNEILE. 


DvuBLIN. 


CONTENTS 


EE a. Was NGI na eA TE a Ea 
CHAPTER 
I. REALITY IN PRAYER . I 
II. Nature 6 
III. PErsons t2 
IV. THE EssENCE OF Phacue 15 
V. PENITENCE AND HUMILITY 19 
VI. INFLUENCE 24 
VII. CHARACTER 20 
VIII. PriestHoop ; 32 
IX. PRAYER AND WoRK . 36 
X. Metuops oF PRAYER 40 
XI. EARNESTNESS 42 
XII. Tue True Motive . 44 
XIII. Puxstic WorsuHIp 47 
XIV. Tuy Witt Be Done 51 
XV. PRAYER oF THOUGHT 53 
XVI. PRAyvER oF UNION 58 
XVII. MisTaKEs . é 60 
XVIII. THe GIve-AND- ayes OF fave 64 
XIX. FELLOWSHIP . 68 
On INTERCESSION 70 


Vil 





SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


PORE ALTTY INGO PRAY TR 


RAYER may be looked at from different 

points of view, as either a problem, a 
phenomenon, or a profession. As a philosophi- 
cal problem it involves other problems, such as 
those connected with the so-called “laws of 
Nature” and miracle, divine foreknowledge 
and determination, and man’s will and power 
of voluntary action. As an historical phenom- 
enon it is a fascinating study; it may be 
traced from the most primitive of savage in- 
cantations till it reaches its highest develop- 
ment in the life of Christian saints. As prob- 
lem or as phenomenon alone, it is of purely 
academic interest ; but whatever may be the best 
word to use as a counterpart to “academic,” 
that word must be applied to prayer as a pro- 
fession. It is a subject that is intensely alive 
to those who believe in it and practice it. And 
this book is written for no one else. There is 


only one object that I would ask you to set be- 
1 


2 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


fore you in reading these pages, and that is to 
study prayer in such a way as to gain a deeper 
and more vivid understanding of its aliveness. 
To study prayer is not simply to study a book 
about it, but to make the suggestions which the 
book contains, if they are of any value, a guide 
in a long, diligent course of self-training. A 
beginner should set himself to practice them, 
as he would work through the exercises in a 
grammar. Ina sermon on the subject it would 
be natural for a preacher to try to rouse his 
audience to pray more. Probably none of us 
prays enough. But it is far more important to 
learn how to pray better. At best “we know 
not what we should pray for as we ought’; 
the Holy Spirit must do that for us “with un- 
utterable groanings,’ because at present we 
know only in part, and pray as well as prophesy 
in part. But even in this partial power that 
we possess there are many different degrees. 
Some Christians are advanced experts, and 
others the most elementary beginners. It is a 
common experience, however, that the advanced 
expert is not always the most suitable person 
to teach the elements of a subject, and that 
is why I can venture to offer these suggestions. 

We are all longing that the world may be- 
come a better world after the War, and number- 


REALITY IN PRAYER 3 


less ideas are afloat as to how to make it so. 
We know that many thousands of men and 
women are not Christians at all, and need to be 
converted. But I am sure—and I say it as de- 
liberately and earnestly as I can—that the great 
and crying need is that those who are Christians 
should learn to pray better. So many do not 
think of it as the profession of their lives, for 
which they need training, practice, experience, 
just as truly as a doctor, or nurse, or school 
teacher. If Christianity is to spread, it must 
be spread by Christians, and the one and only 
effective means of doing so is not argument 
but holiness, which includes prayer. 

Let us begin with our Lord’s words in St. 
Matt. 6:7: “When ye pray, use not idle words” 
—our English translation, “use not vain repe- 
titions,” does not really represent the force of 
the Greek—“use not idle words as the heathen 
do, for they think that they shall be heard for 
their much speaking.’ And do not some 
Christians think the same? or at any rate act 
as if they thought so? They use many books 
of devotion, they attend many services, they 
say many prayers; but all the time they know, 
at the bottom of their hearts, that a great deal 
of it is idle words. Carry your mind back 
to last Sunday, or the last time you were pres- 


4 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


ent at a Church service, and ask yourself— 
How much of that service was, in my case, 
real prayer, and not merely listening, or pos- 
sibly woolgathering, while prayers were being 
read? St. Augustine has a characteristic com- 
ment on our Lord’s words. He says that our 
prayers ought to contain not multa locutio, but 
multa precatio—‘not much speaking, but much 
prayer.” Our great difficulty is not to say a 
great many prayers, but to make our prayers 
alive, and vivid, and real. 

I once read an article in a Church paper 
entitled, “What’s Wrong with the Laity?” I 
have very little doubt as to the answer. The 
mass of Christian people are losing their hold 
on religion, or perhaps I should say religion is 
losing its hold on them, because for some cen- 
turies past its Reality has been gradually fading 
from their lives. God is not real to them, nor 
Christ, nor the Holy Spirit; this world is real 
to them, but not the other. And prayer, instead 
of being the center and mainspring of their 
lives, has become a mere appendage, a nice 
little habit tacked on to them as children with 
their pinafores, and given up when they put 
away childish things. Nothing will make the 
world Christian till the world has learnt to pray. 
And in the same Church paper, soon after- 


REALITY IN PRAYER 5 


wards, some one retorted with the question: 
“What’s Wrong with the Clergy?” And I be- 
lieve the true answer is precisely the same. A 
terribly large percentage of the clergy needs to 
be converted. They are obliged, by their pro- 
fession, to say many prayers; but the best men 
among them would confess that they very often 
use idle words, because their prayers are lack- 
ing in reality. The first step in our self-train- 
ing is to recognize our need. 

At this point the reader who wants to make 
full use of these pages is advised to kneel down 
and think slowly and quietly about himself, to 
find out how great his need really is. In his 
daily life—his work, recreation, walks, meals, 
conversations—how small a place is occupied 
by God! How seldom he remembers Him, or 
does the small daily actions for His sake, with 
the conscious wish to give Him pleasure be- 
cause he loves Him! 


II. NATURE 
OW dwell on the word Reality. Look at 


a rose in summer, arrayed as Solomon in 
all his glory was not arrayed, and try to think 
what it really is. Ask the botanist and the 
biologist to help you, and they will describe, 
probably with many Latin words, its genus 
and family, all its parts, its growth, and its 
habits. But that will not tell you what a rose 
really is. You call in a mathematician, and by 
means of geometry and trigonometry he might 
be able to tell you all about its curves and 
planes; its form and shape could, theoretically 
at any rate, be mapped out in diagrams. But 
that would not express the real rose in its sen- 
suous and compelling loveliness. Or, once 
more, the chemist could tell you the part played 
by sun and rain, air and soil; he might explain’ 
the causes of color and scent. But the real 
rose would be as far off as ever. Something 
affects you which is deeper and more myste- 
rious than all this, something intangible, in- 
visible, but which appeals to you as infinitely 

6 


NATURE 7 


more real than anything which your senses can 
grasp. And we call it Life. Your eye passes 
to another rose, to a lily, to a hundred other 
revelations of beauty. And as you feast your- 
self upon them, you know that it is one and 
the same Life that makes them all what they 
are. You cut a shoot off the rosebush and 
plant it, and it makes roots for itself, and yields 
you another rose. It is the same Life, express- 
ing itself by means of sun and air and soil, 
shape and color and scent. 

Now yield yourself to that thought; deliver 
yourself up to the unspeakable Reality which 
is the source of your garden’s beauty. And 
then let yourself wander on through all the 
vast tracts of the earth, and then through all 
the dizzy tracts of the universe; and try to feel 
that what is true of the rose must be true of 
all that is. Goethe expressed the truth in a 
sentence when he said, “Everything transitory 
is parable’; in other words, everything mate- 
rial is only a temporary outward and visible 
instrument by which Life—Reality—expresses 
itself. 

I think it is probably true to say that the 
great majority of people have done very little 
indeed towards getting into touch with Reality 
in this way. They enjoy what meets their 


8 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


senses, but they do not penetrate to its Source. 
Those who do it most successfully are the true 
artists, the painters and poets and musicians 
and all the people whom we call geniuses. But 
it is possible for every one to do it to some 
extent, if he sets to work to train his faculties 
to that end. An artist of any kind is born, not 
made; but many a born artist has remained un- 
discovered, even by himself, because his natural 
faculties have not been given a proper chance 
of doing their work. I am not, however, ask- 
ing any one to try to become an artist, but to 
try to gain a little more of the wealth of inter- 
est and beauty that is added to life when he can 
feel, or perceive, or realize, the divine Reality 
behind and within everything in the universe. 

This Life, or Reality, which is the only real 
thing in Nature, is sometimes described as 
“supernatural”; but the word is apt to be mis- 
leading, because to so many minds it suggests 
something unreal. We might coin the word 
“intranatural,’ “within the natural’; but we 
must get rid of all notion of space or locality. 
Music is not locally in a violin when it is ex- 
pressed by means of a violin. And the divine 
Reality is not locally in Nature, but expresses 
itself by means of Nature. 

But next let us ask—lIf it is there, why do 


NATURE 9 


not we all realize it naturally? Well, suppose 
we could imagine a person born, and brought 
up, and living unceasingly, in a certain light, 
or with a certain sound always in his ears, or a 
certain scent always in his nostrils. It would 
be very difficult for him to realize the fact of 
such a light, or sound, or scent. He could do it 
only by a special concentration of thought upon 
it. Having been told that it existed, he would 
have to bring himself into such a condition that 
he could disregard everything else that met his 
senses, and strive with his whole being to realize 
that one thing which always surrounded him. 
He could do it gradually, if he went to work 
the right way. This thought of concentration 
is very important, and will come before us 
again, 

To realize the divine Reality in Nature to 
ever so small an extent, to wonder at it, and 
enjoy it, and to be lifted out of ourselves by 
it, is what is called Natural Religion, or the 
Religion of Nature. And some of the artistic 
geniuses who do it well and easily are so en- 
grossed and enraptured that they feel as though 
they were satisfied by it, and so they never get 
any further. They are so entirely enthralled 
by the cult of Beauty that they have no thought 
or conception of anything better. And if to 


Io SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


this Reality, which they reach by means of 
Nature, they give the name God, and find Him 
in no other way, they are what we call Pan- 
theists. The truth contained in Pantheism is 
gloriously true so far as it goes; but by itself 
it is only a half truth, and therefore false. But 
since truth is in it, it ought not to be neglected 
by the Christian. In our self-training in prayer 
it is a real help to practice that inner concen- 
tration by which we can pass through Nature, 
which is seen and temporal and therefore sym- 
bolic and unreal, to that which is unseen and 
eternal and therefore the only Reality. ‘That 
is the nearest approach to prayer that the Pan- 
theist can make; and many of them do make it 
to a wonderful extent, which puts many Chris- 
tians to shame. It is, in fact, an urgent call to 
us for self-scrutiny. It is worth while to pause 
here before passing to the next chapter, and to 
think whether, in this respect, you have not 
been shutting the eyes of your soul to Reality 
—reveling, perhaps, in the sense-enjoyment of 
Nature, but making very little effort to get, by 
means of it, into touch with the Divine. Rec- 
ognize your need, and then begin at once to 
practice, and to train yourself at every oppor- 
tunity to realize that every beautiful object in 
Nature is an instrument by which God is ex- 


NATURE If 


pressing Himself. We know it theoretically; 
sometimes we thank Him for it; but to very 
few is it real. 


Note.—A correspondent writes, “What are we 
to say about ugly things?” I think that we may 
reply by adapting St. Paul’s words in Rom. xiv. 
14: “There is nothing ugly of itself; but to him 
that esteemeth any thing to be ugly, to him it is 
ugly.” Ugliness is my description of the unpleas- 
ant effect produced upon me by the physical ap- 
pearance of a thing. The effect is akin to pain. 
Heat, light, sound, taste, may each be pleasant to 
a certain degree of intensity, but if the intensity 
increases they become painful. And they may be 
pleasant for one person to a much greater degree 
of intensity than for another. It is impossible to 
say that they are instruments of God’s Self- 
expression only as long as they are pleasant, and 
not when they become unpleasant. The problem 
of ugliness, as of pain, is as difficult for our 
_ limited intelligence as the problem of man’s will, 
which can, and does, set itself in opposition to 
God’s will. But it is not to be solved by a dualism 
which excludes from His all-reaching activity 
things which do not cause us physical sensations 
of pleasure. 


III. PERSONS 


HEN we pass from the half truth in 

Pantheism to the whole truth in Chris- 
tianity, our thoughts must move in the same 
direction, but on a higher plane. The Christian 
has learnt that the supreme, the only, Reality— 
that which expresses itself impersonally in 
Nature—is personal. We can speak of He, 
not of It. Personality has been defined as “the 
capacity for fellowship,” that is the capacity 
for self-communication to persons, communion, 
mutual response, mutual indwelling, real union, 
with persons. So that I am able to say—God 
is in me; God is in you. But remember, all 
idea of locality must be avoided. It is not a 
little bit of God inside me, and a little bit of 
God inside you, any more than we can say that 
there is a little bit of music inside one violin 
and a little bit of music inside another violin. 
It is God, the one infinite Reality, who reveals 
Himself as physical life in all Nature, and as 
personal character in man. The twofold truth 


is stated in the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel: 
12 


: 
: 


PERSONS 13 


“All things were made by Him, and without 
Him was not anything made that was made; in 
Him was Life.” Thus far the evangelist de- 
scribes Reality in Nature. But then comes the 
leap to the higher plane: “The Life was the 
Light of men.” That is what makes all man- 
kind one. As individuals, men are only in- 
struments, symbols, “parables,” to use Goethe’s 
word, of the Infinite and the Eternal. But as 
personal, mankind is one communion and fel- 
lowship. And the more we can annul our indi- 
vidual Self, the freer we are to realize our 
oneness with the Whole. He that loseth his 
Self shall find it. 

But the Whole, in its ideal and complete per- 
fection, proceeding eternally from God, exist- 
ing eternally as the Object of God’s love and 
thought, and expressed in time in the Person 
of Jesus Christ, is the Second Person of the 
Holy Trinity. And dwelling in us, manifest- 
ing, expressing Himself by means of us, is His 
Spirit, the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. 
St. Paul had a clear grasp of the twofold truth. 
He describes the purpose for which God con- 
verted him in the words: “It pleased God... 
to reveal His Son in me” (Gal. 1:15) ; God did 
not convert Saul merely for his own sake, but 
that he might become an instrument by which 


14 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


the divine personal Reality should express Him- 
self. And exactly parallel with that is his de- 
scription of the use which God makes of all 
Christians: “There are diversities of workings, 
but the same God who worketh all in all. But 
to each one is given the manifestation of the 
Spirit for the (general) advantage” (I Cor. 
12:6, 7). .The. Holy Spirit manifests, ex- 
presses Himself in all Christians as instru- 
ments, or, as St. Paul puts it later in the chap- 
ter, in all the several members of the one Body 
of Christ. 


iV. THE ESSENCE OF PRAYER 


HE thought of divine Reality expressing 

Himself personally by means of persons 
carries us to the heart of our subject. What 
exactly is prayer? I hope that all that has 
been said so far will have helped to lead us to 
a definition. Prayer is not petition, or inter- 
cession, or praise, or thanksgiving, or medita- 
tion, or contemplation. These are, so to speak, 
the bookwork of the subject; they are the 
grammar and vocabulary of the celestial lan- 
guage. And self-training requires that they 
shall be worked at with steady, plodding, per- 
severance, in order that we may arrive at its 
very spirit and meaning. They are methods, 
which we shall study later; roads by which we 
can travel towards our goal. But the goal 
itself, the inner essence of prayer is one and 
the same. It is by a deliberate act of our whole 
being to make real to ourselves the divine 
Reality. That which is divinely personal in us 
reaches after the personal God who wants to 


reveal Himself through us. It is the act of 
15 


16 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


realizing Christ in us and in all men, of arriv- 
ing at a consciousness of His Spirit in us and 
in all men. A Christian at prayer is like a 
living violin striving to realize, to immerse 
itself consciously in, the musician’s soul of 
which it is an instrument. That which the 
artist does by the consideration of material 
nature, the Christian does, on a higher plane, 
by prayer. “The Life was the Light of men.” 
Light is one of the greatest of Biblical meta- 
phors for the divine, personal Reality revealing 
Himself in man, and found perfectly in Christ. 
And the aim of prayer is to gain a real inner 
perception of the Light. 

But to how many Christians do words like 
these convey any vivid meaning? A sign of 
the extent to which many Christians fail in 
the matter of prayer is the meaning which they 
attach to the word “faith.” We read: “Blessed 
are they that have not seen, and yet have be- 
lieved”; and St. Paul says: “We walk by faith, 
not by sight.” Such sayings mean that we 
must not wait to accept spiritual truths until 
we are convinced of them by proofs supplied 
through our bodily senses, or arrived at intel- 
lectually by logical deduction. But many peo- 
ple are apt to make “faith” equivalent to what 
is called “blind faith,” a nominal acceptance of 


THE ESSENCE OF PRAYER Ly, 


untried truths simply on the testimony of 
others—the testimony of the Bible, or of the 
experience of other Christians. 

There is, indeed, another misuse of the word 
“faith,” which has to do with answers to prayer. 
Some people make it mean a feeling of cer- 
tainty that God will give something that He is 
asked for, which, if they could only contrive 
to feel it, would be an infallible magic in pro- 
curing whatever they happen to want. And 
when God does not give just what they happen 
to want, because it would not help forward His 
plans for them and for mankind, they conclude 
mournfully that the reason must have been their 
want of faith. 

Both of these are caricatures of real faith. 
Faith is that which enables us to say: “We 
speak that we do know, and testify that we have 
seen.” The Queen of Sheba heard a report in 
her own land of Solomon’s wealth and wisdom; 
and she was willing to accept the information 
as trustworthy. But when she came—that was 
the real act of faith—and saw it with her own 
eyes, she said, “Behold the half was not told 


9 


me, 


But what to those who find? Ah! this 
Nor tongue nor pen can shew; 


18 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


The love of Jesus, what tt is 
None but His loved ones know. 


It is quite right to begin by taking the fact of 
Christ for granted on the report of others; but 
it is something unspeakably different when we 
reach actual personal experience. That is the 
crying need of to-day. The faith in Christ of 
so very many Christians is still nominal, and 
theoretical, and conventional. “The Incarnate, 
Crucified, and Risen Christ is the only Reality 
—our salvation and strength and glory and 
joy? Yes, oh yes, so I have been told; and I 
quite believe it. That is why I say my prayers 
and go to Church.” But it isn’t real to them. 
We want to be able to say, as the Samaritans 
said to the woman, “Now we believe, not be- 
cause of thy speaking, for we have heard for 
ourselves.” ‘Oh come hither and hearken, all 
ye that fear God, and I will tell you what He 
hath done for my soul!” That is the result of 
faith. Faith is the action of the whole being 
which drives a man to make experiment, to gain 
living experience, of the divine Reality; and 
prayer is the experiment and the experience. 


V. PENITENCE AND HUMILITY 


E must next turn to a thought of quite 

immeasurable importance. If the divine 
Reality, which wants to express itself, is per- 
sonal, and possesses character, it can be realized 
in actual experience only by persons possessed 
of character akin to it. In other words, that 
which destroys our power of experiencing 
Reality, and hinders us from reaching after 
union with it, is Sin. The pure in heart shall 
see God. Perfect sinlessness alone can be in 
complete oneness with infinite perfection. It is 
only by being united with Christ’s sinlessness, 
by being “accepted in the Beloved,” that we 
can begin to catch the faintest spiritual glimpse 
of the personal Reality. But to be accepted in 
the Beloved means to be forgiven by God. And 
therefore at every stage in our self-training no 
step in advance is conceivable without Peni- 
tence. Weare-always surrounded by the limit- 
less ocean of God’s love, but like the shellfish 
we can shut it out. When penitence opens the 
shell, the love of God immediately, “auto- 

19 


20 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


matically” floods our heart, and we are for- 
given. But as long as we have one sin know- 
ingly unrepented of, one sin from which we 
do not really want to be free, any approach to 
Reality is absolutely barred. Sin is the asser- 
tion of our individual Self, the separation of 
our individual Self from the infinite Person. 
Sin is the act of moving away from God; and 
since prayer is the act of moving into union 
with Him, sin and prayer are a contradiction 
in terms. 

And from Penitence Humility is born. It 
sounds hard, but it must be said: You cannot 
pray, you cannot get into touch with divine 
Reality, except in proportion to your humility ; 
your selflessness; your readiness, for example, 
to take a rebuke or a slight without resentment, 
to give a real meaning to St. Paul’s words “in 
honour preferring one another,’ to esteem 
others better than yourself. You can pray only 
in proportion as you “have this mind in you 
which was also in Christ Jesus, who... 
emptied Himself ... humbled Himself, be- 
coming obedient even to (the climax of) death, 
yea the death of the Cross.” “Becoming obedi- 
ent.” That is, to most of us, a matter of 
desperate difficulty: sheer humble obedience to 
God’s will, in whatever form, or by whatever 


PENITENCE AND HUMILITY 21 


means, it may make itself known to us, whether 
through the guidance of circumstances, or the 
call of conscience, or—what is often harder to 
accept—through other people. 

And beside the difficulty of obedience there 
is the difficulty of readiness to be in the back- 
ground, to be unnoticed, and passed over, to 
take trouble and to receive in return little or 
no praise or acknowledgment or thanks. Every 
one has felt the thousand pin pricks of life, 
which hurt so horribly while we are diseased 
with Self-love. They usurp our whole atten- 
tion, they keep our thought and memory en- 
grossed. While we are feeling resentment, 
pride, touchiness, temper, and such like, we 
cannot feel God. While we are in the grip of 
Self we cannot be free to fling out our arms in 
a yearning grasp of the Infinite and the Eternal. 

So we begin to see why it is that the great 
masters of the spiritual life who have taught 
the world how to pray, one and all without 
exception, began and carried on their self- 
training with penitence, self-mortification, 
struggles against sin, humility, selflessness. 
Every branch in the True Vine that beareth 
fruit, even to the extent of the first newborn 
desire to feel after Him and find Him, the 
Father purgeth that it may bring forth more 


22 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


fruit. And if He does it by sorrow, anxiety, 
or pain, it is for the same all-loving purpose. 
However far you advance, however close the 
union with God to which you attain, the purg- 
ing must still go on, that you may bear more 
and more fruit, and learn obedience by the 
things that you suffer. 

And is not that exactly the meaning of Bap- 
tism? Union with the Divine Life by means 
of a death unto sin. The struggle of the Chris- 
tian towards God is simply the continuation, 
the making real and actual, of the New Birth 
in Baptism. 

Before passing on to the next chapter I 
would ask you to undergo again a long quiet 
self-scrutiny, to determine, as fully and ruth- 
lessly as you can, the ways—perhaps the many 
ways—in which Self asserts its claims in your 
life; the ways in which you find obedience and 
humility peculiarly difficult. And then offer a 
prayer of penitence. 

The first part of our subject is now com- 
pleted. I hope that the reader will not be sur- 
prised that up to this point practically nothing 
has been said about prayer as it is usually 
understood. Precisely what I am trying to do 
is to get away from the ordinary, conventional 
ideas about prayer, and to carry our minds to 


PENITENCE AND HUMILITY 23 


the point of view of those who knew more 
about it by experience than most of us have 
attained to—people like St. Augustine, St. 
Bernard, St. Teresa, Brother Laurence, and 
many others; and behind them the apostles and 
prophets on whom the Church is built; and 
behind them Jesus Christ Himself the head 
Corner Stone. All these knew by vivid, com- 
pelling, personal experience that prayer is not 
a mere telephoning to God to ask Him to do 
things, but a developing life, an expanding, 
deepening, heightening, intensifying, of the 
whole being, by allowing it to be drawn in the 
embrace of God nearer and nearer to Himself. 


VI. INFLUENCE 


HE second part of our subject will still 

not be prayer as ordinarily understood. 
Nevertheless it brings before us an aspect of 
our self-training whose importance cannot be 
exaggerated. In Chapter III it was said that 
because the divine Reality makes mankind the 
instrument of His personal Self-expression, the 
medium through which He reveals Himself— 
in other words, because “the Life was the Light 
of men’—all mankind is one. If you tell some 
people that, they will shrug their shoulders and 
say, “No doubt there is a sense in which it is 
theoretically true; but practically it is non- 
sense; mankind is many and not one.” To 
speak of the solidarity of man is a playing with 
words, a fanciful absurdity, to those whose 
thoughts are bound to the transitory, material, 
surface things of life. But for self-training in 
prayer it is all-important to try to gain a vivid 
grasp of itas areal truth. The tendency of the 
modern Western mind is towards Individual- 


ism, but it is a tendency which leads away from 
24 


INFLUENCE 25 


prayer. That is one of the reasons why true 
prayer—the real thing—has been fading away 
from so many lives. 

When we approach the conception of the 
oneness of mankind, we must try to lift it out 
of vagueness, and to change it from an abstrac- 
tion or a poetical figure of speech into a clear- 
cut and appealing fact. And I think that the 
best way to do that is to study what we call 
Influence. It will show us what we want to 
see in—one might almost say—an outward and 
visible form. Consider the word itself. Who- 
ever was responsible for coining it went a long 
way towards explaining the idea. “Influence’’ 
is derived from the same word as “Influx,” a 
“pouring or flowing in.” Any word involving 
the thought of motion in space, if it 1s employed 
to describe that which is nonmaterial, must be 
recognized as metaphorical. But this is, at 
least, an extremely good metaphor. Influence 
is the pouring in of personality into personality ; 
it is the interpenetration of souls. An officer 
is in a trench with his men, and the order comes 
to make a charge. He leads the way with the 
courage of a true man, shouts a rousing word 
of encouragement, and pours courage into the 
whole of his company. But think what that 
means. Courage is not an unreal abstraction, 


26 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


but, on the other hand, it is not a thing in itself 


with an existence separate from the officer. It 
is his courage which he pours into them, an 
ingredient of the person flowing into other 
persons. May we not say that Influence, looked 
at in this way, becomes a clear-cut and appeal- 
ing fact? Courage does not leave the officer. 
On the contrary his courage grows, because in 
rousing his men to courage, he in turn receives 
theirs poured into him. It is a mutual influx 
of personalities. But I think we may go fur- 
ther, and say that all the soldiers who fought 
bravely in Europe and Asia and Africa, 
whether of the allies or of the enemy, were 
severally items in one complex system of In- 
fluence. The mutual give-and-take of courage 
extended over three continents. And more 
than that, it extended to thousands who were 
not fighting; the courage of the wounded, the 
courage of those who were maimed for life, 
the courage of prisoners of war, and the cour- 
age of multitudes of men and women who were 
bravely bearing sorrow, anxiety, and strain. It 
was one communion and fellowship of cou- 
rageous souls, every one of whom was poured 
into all the others. 

But that was only one minute specimen of 
Influence. When one person receives it from 


—— 


INFLUENCE ey 


another, whether in the form of courage or of 
any other ingredient of the soul, it can flow on 
from him into others without diminishing in 
the process, and with no limits of possibility. 
All mankind, past and present, form one com- 
munion and fellowship, one inconceivably com- 
plex system of interpenetration. If you think 
it out, it is a frightening thought—the im- 
measurable responsibility of every soul in its 
effects upon the whole of mankind. It is paral- 
lel with what we are told is the case in the 
physical universe. In a paper entitled “The 
Modern Conception of the Universe,” * Dr. G. 
F, C. Searle writes: “The effects of a single act 
of free-will extend through the whole of space, 
and will last as long as the present order con- 
tinues. Thus the voluntary motion of a man’s 
hand not only affects the motion of the earth 
by a calculable amount, but also the motions of 
the sun and of the remotest stars, and the 
motions of all these bodies will differ for the 
rest of time from the motions they would have 
had if the man had not moved his hand.” 

And if it is a frightening thought, it is also 
extraordinarily humbling when it is once clearly 
grasped. The words I and Me begin to be a 





; * Pan-Anglican Papers, S.P.C.K., 1908. 


28 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


little less clear-cut and obtrusive. We begin 
to see that it is not only proud but also very 
silly to lay so much stress on our individual 
Self, when we realize that the soul of each of 
us is conditioned, to so enormous an extent, by 
the interplay of all souls. 

Influence, then, is an almost visible exhibi-— 
tion of the oneness of mankind. If you dwell 
on it, and allow yourself quietly to be steeped 
in the notion of the interpenetration of per- 
sonalities, you can almost come to see it. On 
certain occasions, with certain groups or bodies 
of people collected together, it is peculiarly 
vivid. Sometimes when you and another per- 
son are alone together, you can affect each 
other intensely; something seems to pass and 
repass between you so real that you feel as 
though you can, so to speak, cut it with a knife. 
But apart from these special instances, it is 
possible to gain a real grasp of the truth as a 
whole. And we must remember that it is not 
only the Influence of which we are conscious 
that counts, but also that far greater mass of 
which we are unconscious, that is poured out 
by, and stored up in, what is popularly called 
our subconsciousness, and shows itself perhaps 
long afterwards in word or deed or thought or 
habit. It all goes to shape character. 


INFLUENCE 29 


This wonderful system of mutuality between 
souls is an instance of something which it is 
very hard to grasp because we always live in 
it. But the reader is strongly advised, if he 
wishes to excel in prayer, to make a frequent 
and diligent practice of concentrating himself 
upon it, until it emerges and takes shape as one 
of the most compelling objects of his thought. 


Vil CO AR AC TER 


ET us go further, and see what follows 
from this. If all souls interpenetrate, 
mankind is not merely a jumble of different 
characters, like a boxful of differently colored 
marbles. Mankind, as one real whole, pos- 
sesses one real character, the net result, at any 
given moment, of the whole process of its 
spiritual life. Every thought, word, and deed 
of every individual either lifts up or drags 
down, either improves or spoils, the net char- 
acter of the whole, because every thought, word, 
and deed affects his own character, and there- 
fore his influence. If one member suffer— 
spiritually—all the members suffer with it. 

To grasp this truly and thoroughly is to 
arrive at a motive for holiness, and therefore 
a motive for prayer, which is free from all 
taint of Self. “For their sake I sanctify my- 
self” —in order to lift up the net character of 
mankind. But when we speak of lifting up, 
or dragging down, the character of mankind, 


we mean drawing it nearer to, or further from, 
30 


CHARACTER 31 


the Character of God. That is the character 
that He wants to reveal and express in man- 
kind as His instrument. It is the character of 
mankind as He thinks and plans it, and works 
and longs for it. In other words, it is the 
Character of the Incarnate, Crucified, and 
Risen Christ, Eternal, Human, Universal, the 
perfect expression of God, offering His life and 
power and perfection to every soul who wants 
to lift up the character of men. 


VIII. PRIESTHOOD 


LL that has been said in the foregoing 
pages leads to the thought of Priesthood, 
which is quite fundamental in Christianity, and 
without which prayer is well-nigh emptied of 
all meaning. 

An ambassador at a foreign court communi- 
cates the will of his government. In that act 
his individual self is by the nature of the case 
blotted out and nonexistent. His nation as a 
single whole expresses itself by means of him; 
he is a point at which the whole of one nation 
can come into contact with the whole of an- 
other nation. 

And every human being is similarly repre- 
sentative of the whole of mankind. But to 
grasp the oneness of mankind, and the oneness 
of its character, and our representative relation 
to it, to concentrate ourselves upon it, to ponder 
it, and at last to feel it, is to feel the shame of 
the sin of the world—not only the shame of my 
sin, because it spoils my character, but the 
shame of all men’s sin, because it wrongs the 

32 


PRIESTHOOD 33 


Father of love, who wants to express Himself 
perfectly in man. The closer that we approach 
to union with Reality, the more we shall, as a 
medieval writer puts it, “feel sin as a lump”— 
feel all sin as one vast mass of crushing de- 
filement which keeps mankind from rising to 
the divine ideal. Self-training in prayer, for 
any one who wants to become an expert, in- 
volves long and earnest practice in this realiza- 
tion of the oneness of human sin as of the 
oneness of human character. To feel all sin as 
my own, to feel myself a point at which human 
sin reveals itself, is at the opposite pole to the 
self-congratulation which says “I thank Thee 
that I am not as other men are.” As far as 
the East is from the West so far is true “sym- 
pathy” removed from pious horror. But 
equally far is it removed from “apathy,” and 
from the weak amiability which condones sin 
as a foible or a misfortune. To “feel sin 
as a lump” is to feel it intensely as your own; 
and the more you can do so, the nearer you 
will reach to the infinite sympathy of the Lamb 
of God, the sinless Penitent, who “taketh away 
the sin of the world” by making it His own, 
and destroying it by His life of obedience cul- 
minating on the Cross. That is what St. Paul 
meant when he said that “God made Him who 


34 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


knew no sin to be sin on our behalf” (II Cor. 
5:21). Any crude notion of mere substitution 
is far removed from this wonderful aspect of 
the Atonement. 

And what is true of all sin is true of all 
sorrow. Here we use the word “sympathy” 
with the meaning that is more commonly 
attached to it. ‘Surely He hath borne our 
griefs and carried our sorrows.” In His 
measureless love He not only knew, but felt 
Himself to be the Representative of mankind, 
and therefore felt the world’s agony as His 
own. And every human being is necessarily 
a representative of mankind; but we seldom get 
beyond the point of knowing it theoretically. 
To make it real, and feel it, requires a lifelong 
progress in love. And love grows by prayer, 
which brings us gradually to the realization of 
the oneness of the life of men. As we keep 
these things and ponder them in our hearts we 
learn that self-training in prayer involves fol- 
lowing our Lord to Calvary, and hanging with 
Him upon His Cross. 

But this is what we mean by a “priest.” A 
priest is one who “being taken from among 
men is appointed for men in things pertaining 
to God” (Heb. 5:1). And from among the 
whole body of mankind a particular group of 


PRIESTHOOD 35 


people has been divinely appointed to be “a 
kingdom of priests,” that is the Christian 
Church, which in turn chooses and appoints its 
representatives whom we call priests. The 
Church is the priest of mankind. And every 
Christian—man, woman, and child—ought to 
be taught that his whole and sole function, in 
things pertaining to God, is to exercise the 
priestly office. Every Christian, in so far as he 
is truly Christian, is a point at which mankind 
comes into union with God. Through Chris- 
tians the Self-expression of the personal God 
is deepened and intensified as the ages go by, 
because the Church is in living and progressive 
union with the perfect expression of God, Jesus 
Christ the Priest. 

Self-training in prayer, therefore, requires 
us to ponder on our priesthood, and on the 
“sympathy” which it involves, and to give ita 
living place in our understanding and life. 


IX. PRAYER AND WORK 


| fa the first five chapters our thoughts dwelt 
mainly upon God as the one infinite per- 
sonal Reality. In the next three we considered 
mankind as the instrument of His Self-expres- 
sion. All this has shown us that prayer is a 
very big thing, a lifelong profession needing 
the most patient and strenuous self-training. 
The way is now clear to think of prayer as 
ordinarily understood, that is the various meth- 
ods of prayer. But as a preliminary the rela- 
tion between prayer and work calls for atten- 
tion. 

Every one is busy, or nearly every one. And 
some people are tempted to think: “Prayer? Oh 
yes, very important of course; but just now I 
absolutely haven’t the time!’ And they are 
inclined to add, “After all, when one is work- 
ing for others it is a relief to think that laborare 
est orare, to work is to pray.” Now when a 
person thinks that he is too busy to pray, he 
feels it annoying to be referred to the story of 
Martha and Mary, and cannot help sympathiz- 

36 


PRAYER AND WORK 37 


ing very much with Martha. But I am sure 
that that story is constantly misused. Are we 
really to suppose that Mary spent the whole of 
her life sitting still and doing nothing but con- 
template, or read her Bible, while Martha spent 
the whole of her lifé in housework? Her 
grumble against Mary, “Lord, carest Thou not 
that my sister hath left me to serve alone?” 
shows that she was not accustomed to be left 
to serve alone, and that Mary usually helped 
her. Martha and Mary must not be taken as 
types of two people, the one all work and the 
other all prayer. They are a photograph, a 
snapshot, so to speak, of two states of mind at 
a particular moment—the moment when the 
chance offered itself of a quiet, satisfying con- 
versation with our Lord. Mary seized it and 
Martha did not. They represent, in fact, two 
different attitudes towards the divine Reality. 
A few people have received a vocation to spend 
their lives in prayer, and nothing but prayer. 
But the majority, whose vocation is to what is 
called an active life of work, can themselves 
be likened to either Martha or Mary according 
as their work is lacking in prayer or filled with 
prayer. The question is, What is the meaning 
of work filled with prayer? Now I cannot 
speak smooth things; I must put before you 


38 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


the highest Christian ideal. It means work 
done in such a condition of soul that in every 
detail, in every hour and moment and second, 
you are filled with the Presence of God, you 
are in touch with the divine Reality. To make 
quite true in your life the saying that “to work 
is to pray,’ is to be Martha and Mary at the 
same time; and that is the climax of Christian 
perfection. It gives a new meaning to the Gos- 
pels to read the accounts of our Lord’s busy 
life, remembering that that was literally true 
of Him; never for an instant was He out of 
touch with God. But how did He doit? Even 
He did not spend His whole life in work. Be- 
cause He was human, because He was tempted 
like as we are, and hemmed in by physical 
limitations as we are, He spent long, long hours 
of silent solitude and prayer, keeping Himself 
in unvarying union with the divine Reality. 
And if He needed it, how can we dare to spend 
a busy day without it? We must follow Mary 
every day, if we are to do Martha’s work with- 
out the Lord’s rebuke. If in all the busy racket 
of work we are to dwell under the defense of 
the Most High, and abide under the shadow of 
the Almighty, we must retain that defense, and 
hide ourselves under that shadow, by making 
time for deep, quiet prayer. It is the stern 


PRAYER AND WORK 39 


practice in private that makes the world-famed 
professional. And if it is our profession to 
“follow the example of our Saviour Christ and 
to be made like unto Him,” in other words, to 
be priests always in touch with God on behalf 
of mankind, an absolute necessity in our self- 
training is practice in private. 


X. METHODS OF PRAYER 


T is this practice of prayer in its various 

methods that we are now to study. Dif- 
ferent writers have classified prayer in different 
ways. But perhaps the most helpful classi- 
fication is one which may be connected with 
our Lord’s words, “Ask and it shall be given 
you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall 
be opened unto you.” We may call the 
three classes Prayer of Utterance, Prayer of 
Thought, and Prayer of Union. 

Prayer of Utterance comprises all prayer 
that takes the form of words, whether actually 
vocal and audible, or uttered internally in the 
mind. This includes petitions for oneself, in- 
tercession for others, and praise and thanks- 
giving to God. And I think that for large 
numbers of Christians who have not made 
much effort at self-training this virtually ex- 
hausts the whole of prayer. And even in this 
class, the practice of one or two or all three of 
them divides Christians into three grades. The 
least trained do not rise beyond petitions for 


METHODS OF PRAYER 4I 


their personal needs, and that mostly when the 
needs are sudden and pressing. That is the 
sort of prayer that a good many people use 
instinctively. That their prayers are often in- 
tensely earnest, and that God hears them, no 
Christian would think of doubting. But if 
their prayers do not advance beyond that, the 
natural eagerness with which they ask for the 
supply of immediate personal needs will not 
carry them far in their spiritual progress. 
But any one who can add to his prayer inter- 
cession for others, has taken a great step for- 
ward. And the intercessions increase in width 
and range with the Christian’s spiritual growth. 
But, thirdly, to add praise and thanksgiving to 
God with any reality of meaning marks a much 
further advance. 


XI. EARNESTNESS 


OW, what is it that makes prayer effec- 
tual? Or, in other words, what sort of 
prayer accomplishes most? 

It is easy to give a wrong answer to the 
question, and to think that effectiveness in 
prayer depends simply on the earnestness with 
which we pray. But take an instance. A 
mother is in an agony of mind because her little 
child falls dangerously ill, and she prays for 
his recovery with an earnestness equal to her 
agony of mind. And she may be inclined to 
feel, “Surely, surely, God cannot refuse me 
what I long for so intensely!’ Just down the 
street there is a workhouse, where a little child 
is dangerously ill in the infirmary. His parents 
are dead, and no one in the world is fond 
enough of him to pour out passionate, agon- 
ized petitions for him. Do you suppose that 
God is going to restore the first child to health, 
but let the second die because any prayers that 
may have been offered for him were not earnest 
enough? When it comes to earnestness, peti- 


tions for ourselves and intercessions for others 
42 


EARNESTNESS 43 


are sometimes hardly distinguishable. It is 
natural and human to feel a desire most acutely 
when it is for something which bears upon one- 
self. And this is, for the most part, true even 
in the matter of praise and thanksgiving to 
God. We are generally moved to thank Him 
most warmly for blessings which affect us 
individually. If the former of the two children 
recovers, we can picture the eager joy with 
which the mother will pour out her thanks, 
whereas no one, perhaps, will feel the same joy 
over the motherless waif. We do not, of 
course, find fault with the earnestness of per- 
sonal desire; but we must not think of it as 
capable in itself of persuading God to give us 
what He might not have given us otherwise. 
Further, if earnestness of personal desire is 
the one thing needful, what are we to think of 
the effects produced by our public worship? 
I am very far from saying that our prayers, 
private and public, are not in need of more 
earnestness; but it must be an earnestness of 
the right kind; one that is not excited by the 
faintest touch of Self. In our training and 
practice in prayer few things are harder, and 
few things are more important, than this escape 
from Self. Our earnestness must be the 
earnestness not of individuals but of priests. 


A DAE AR Mio 


ND so we go back to the subject of Chap- 
ters VI-VIII, mankind, as one real 
whole, growing up towards the perfect Man. 
The nearer we can get to a passionate earnest- 
ness for that, the more will our prayer accom- 
plish. Look at St. Paul. He wrote to the 
Colossians (2:1): “I want you to know how 
great a conflict I have [that is, with what 
agony of earnestness I pray] for you, and them 
at Laodicea, and as many as have not seen my 
face in the flesh.” He had not founded either 
of those Churches, and his earnestness, there- 
fore, was not caused by the fact that he was 
praying for personal friends, but was due to 
his burning desire for the building up of the 
whole Body of Christ, through which all man- 
kind could be lifted into union with God. 
Think of your prayers for foreign missions, 
and for the Church’s work at home, your pray- 
ers for the clergy, soldiers, sailors, doctors, 
nurses, chaplains, at home and abroad. Test 
your state of advance with regard to self- 
44 


THE TRUE MOTIVE 45 


training in prayer. Is the lifting up of man- 
kind as one whole into union with God a motive 
real and pressing enough to give you a deep 
earnestness in these intercessions? And your 
prayers for your nation. What is their motive? 
They may spring from various degrees of self- 
ishness. But the only sort of prayer that will 
accomplish anything is that the success of your 
nation, and the nature of its successes, and 
its consequences, may serve the purposes of 
God’s king¢dom—the lifting up of all mankind 
into union with Him. 

And your prayers for the departed. It ought 
not to have needed the War to bring back this 
practice into wider use. If mankind is one, it 
is not only the little group of human lives at 
present on the planet in flesh and blood, but all 
souls past and present, who must be lifted up 
into union with God. Our prayers for them 
and theirs for us are alike intercessions for 
mankind as one whole. 

Further, if this and nothing less than this is 
really our longing desire, we shall free our- 
selves from what is for some earnest Christians 
a great difficulty and snare. We shall be able 
to avoid the distracted feeling that, owing to 
the multitude of things and persons that need 
our prayers, we cannot, so to speak, cover the 


46 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


ground. It is right, of course, to offer par- 
ticular intercessions on matters which come 
under our individual notice, and are com- 
mended to our sympathy, provided we place 
them in their true relation to the whole. But 
we must not let ourselves wander into discur- 
siveness, which too often means perfunctori- 
ness; we must throw off the burden of mere 
multiplicity. That is a form of the “much 
speaking” in prayer which our Lord condemns. 
Our intercessions are not valuable in propor- 
tion to the number of things that we pray 
about, 


XIII, PUBLIC WORSHIP 


HAT is where public worship ought to be 
a help rather than a difficulty. In public 
worship we join, as members of the Church, 
in a corporate act, “to make prayers and sup- 
plications and to give thanks for all men” as 
our Prayer Book puts it. Try hard to make 
more real the conception of the Church as the 
priest of humanity; try hard to feel that the 
Church is not a collection of pious individuals, 
but a single organism working for the spiritual 
advance of the whole body of mankind; and 
Church services, even the sober intellectual re- 
straint of Morning and Evening Prayer and 
the Litany, will become a new thing to you. 
Above all, the Holy Communion must be 
freed from every vestige of Self. It is in its 
essence a corporate act in behalf of all men, 
one aspect of which is intercession. Whatever 
your particular shade of views about the doc- 
trine of the Holy Sacrament, to leave it out of 
your life, or to throw it in occasionally as an 
extra, is to neglect the most non-selfish act of 
47 


48 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


intercession that you can make. Throughout 
the length and breadth of our religion the 
spiritual and the sacramental are complemen- 
tary to each other. The Christian, therefore, 
who practices intercession without sacramental 
intercession cannot, from the nature of the 
case, reach the fullest success in his self-train- 
ing. 

Again, if any advance in prayer must begin, 
for each of us, with penitence and self-morti- 
fication, the same is true of corporate prayer. 
It ought to be the result of true sympathy, the 
feeling of the shame of the world’s sin, of 
which we thought in Chapter VIII. The avoid- 
ance of a corporate act of penitence by English . 
Christians during the War, lest the enemy 
should think we were downhearted, or doubted 
the rightness of our national cause, was a 
mournful exhibition of ignorance as to the 
nature of prayer. 

Probably most Christians would admit that 
one of their greatest needs in the spiritual life 
is the self-training which will enable them to 
make public worship what it is intended to 
be. We must immerse ourselves, gradually, by 
practice, in the reality of the corporate life of 
the Church acting for mankind as one Whole 
in things pertaining to God. In Chapter II we 


PUBLIC WORSHIP 49 


thought of the concentration by which it is 
possible to gaze with the eye of the soul through 
Nature to the divine Reality. And the same 
is true with regard to mankind. It would be 
a great help in practice if some members of a 
congregation would agree beforehand to come 
to an ordinary Church service with the united 
intention of concentrating themselves upon 
mankind as a whole, striving to make every 
petition bear upon that. They would find our 
Lord’s words come home to them with won- 
derful force: “If two of you shall agree upon 
earth concerning any matter that they shall ask, 
it shall be done for them by My Father which 
is in heaven.” The concentration of two is 
more than double the concentration of one; 
they can help each other to reach out to the 
divine Reality. 

But this is a matter which needs long and 
patient practice. If the reader to whom this 
point of view is new will study his Prayer 
Book, as though for the first time, in such a 
way as to learn to make “We,” “Us,” and 
“Our” refer in every case not to the individual 
worshipers gathered at the moment in Church, 
much less to himself alone, but to mankind of 
which we are members, and to make every 
petition in which the personal pronoun does not 


50 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


occur definitely contribute to the working out 
of God’s plan of lifting up the whole of man- 
kind, he will realize how large and noble an 
element of public worship has hitherto been lost 
to him. 


PoDreeet hy WALT Di DOIN 


HE same motive will safeguard our 

private petitions for ourselves. They 
will not be individual but personal, that is, they 
will be petitions that something may be granted 
to us which will somehow, in the manifold 
wisdom of God, advance the one personal life 
of mankind. That is really the meaning of 
saying “Grant me this if it is Thy will,’ and 
also “Grant me this for Jesus Christ’s sake.” 
God’s will is always that “all men should be 
saved,” all men as one whole should grow to- 
wards the perfect Man; and nothing which will 
not contribute to that will receive the endorse- 
ment of the perfect Man, and be included in 
the intercessions which, with unutterable groan- 
ings, the Holy Spirit offers for and in us; and 
hence nothing which will not contribute to that 
will be granted to us as an answer to prayer. 
This motive will give us perfect peace and sub- 
mission in the numberless cases in which we do 
not get just what we ask for. “Ask and it shall 


be given you,’ means ask with God’s will for 
51 


52 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


mankind in view, and ye shall receive, not 
necessarily your exact request, but that which 
you really want far more—something that will 
help to work out His will. 

But it is impossible that that motive can 
really move us unless we are in close contact 
with Him—not holding the right views about 
Him, not a general benevolence which can ex- 
tend itself widely over mankind, but real, inner, 
living contact with Him; in other words, real, 
inner, living love for Him, a love which wants 
nothing but that His will may be done, and 
wants that with all the strength of our being, 
and a love which is always ready to praise and 
thank Him for every exhibition of His will, 
whether it sends to us what we commonly call 
blessings, or whether, for His own loving 
purposes, it places us, and all the nations of the 
earth, with Him on the Cross. 


XV. PRAYER OF THOUGHT 


‘* ASK and it shall be given you, seek and ye 

shall find.” The first has suggested 
Prayer of Utterance, or verbal prayer. The 
second suggests what I have called Prayer of 
Thought. 

The search for truth has been the occupation 
of all thinking people in all countries at all 
times. In every branch of learning students 
profess, as the object of their lives, to be seek- 
ers after truth; some call themselves seekers 
after God. But in every branch of learning, 
intellectual search will teach men only facts 
about God and His actions, it will not find 
God Himself. We saw how true this is in 
thinking about a rose. Biologist, botanist, 
mathematician, chemist, or all combined, can- 
not make you know what a rose really is. 
And if this is ‘the case with the divine Reality 
in Nature it is not less so with the divine per- 
sonal Reality in man. To reach that, requires 
our will and our emotions more than our in- 
tellect; it requires something which is of the 

53 


54 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


nature of spiritual thought rather than of 
study. And this is afforded by what is usually 
called Meditation, in which the intellectual 
faculty is not excluded but takes the lowest 
place. 

Large numbers of Christians think of medi- 
tation as an elaborate and artificial exercise of 
pious ingenuity for which a few religiously 
minded people seem to have time and inclina- 
tion, but which for most people is quite out of 
the question. I will not pretend that it is easy. 
The easy things are not always the most worth 
doing. But whatever else may be said about 
it, “elaborate” and “‘artificial’’ are the last 
epithets that it deserves. Utter simplicity is 
the first mark of true meditation. The reason 
why it is not easy is that, being a method of 
reaching after contact with God, it requires all 
the preliminary conditions of penitence and 
humility. It requires a real longing to find the 
very God Himself, and it requires considerable 
determination, especially for beginners. 

An illustration may help to show what it 
means. Some people, when they travel, fly 
from place to place, seeing the famous sights 
as fast as trains and motors will carry them. 
They want to have seen as many things as 
possible. But this continual hustling allows of 


PRAYER OF THOUGHT 55 


no real, intimate, inner knowledge of any one 
thing or place. That is like a person who reads 
through some prayers, or a passage in the 
Bible, and feels that he has done his duty to 
God for the day. But has he? Has he found 
God? Has he gained afresh any real, intimate, 
inner knowledge of Him? To do that, he must 
constantly pause over a verse, a phrase, even 
a word, and gaze right into its meaning, and 
get something out of it for his soul. He must 
go so slowly that it becomes a means of seeking 
after Reality, and finding in scene after scene, 
or sentence after sentence, a message from 
God which he, in turn, can translate into fer- 
vent prayer for himself and for others, into 
an earnest longing, or a hope, or a resolve, or 
a cry of penitence. It does not need elaborate 
study, or cleverness; it does not need any care- 
ful arrangement of your thoughts such as you 
would want if you had to preach a sermon or 
give a lesson; indeed it is a misuse of medita- 
tion to make it a means of preparing a sermon 
or a lesson. But it needs an eager desire to 
use the words, through which you are very 
slowly wandering, as a medium by which to get 
yourself into closer contact with God. It does 
not matter what you do with the passage; your 
treatment of it is known only to God and your- 


56 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


self. It does not matter whether you can exer- 
cise much brilliant imagination or none at all. 
The only thing you have to do is to make the 
passage, or sentence, or word, by any means 
you like, and by as many means as you can 
contrive, helpful to your spiritual life, that is 
to your will and your love, your determination 
and your longing to reach after God. You need 
not expect to gain much pleasure from it at 
first; possibly you may never gain much pleas- 
ure from it. The facility in meditation of the 
spontaneous kind that makes it a daily delight 
to some people is not given to every one. But 
the patient continuance in effort is itself a dis- 
cipline of incalculable value. And even to 
* those who find the effort very hard indeed there 
comes from time to time a flash of spiritual 
insight which lights up a sentence, and makes 
the way easier. For the purpose of meditation 
the New Testament, since it deals directly with 
Jesus Christ, especially a Gospel, is more likely 
to be helpful than anything else, because He is 
the perfect revelation of God, and therefore it 
is easier to reach God by pondering on Him 
than on any other thing or person. 

It is possible also to make use sometimes of 
a devotional book and not the Bible. But it is 
generally the best plan not to depend upon 


PRAYER OF THOUGHT 57 


other people’s meditations, but to undergo the 
effort of making your own, however imper- 
fectly. 

All the great saints in the Church’s history, 
and all the holiest men and women alive to-day, 
have made use of meditation as an absolutely 
indispensable part of their self-training. And 
no Christian who really wants to train himself 
in prayer can do without it. 

Some people find it wise not to make a rule 
to give to it a fixed time every day, because in 
a busy life there are days when this is almost 
impossible; but make a rule, and often ask for 
the strength of God to help you to keep it, to 
spend on meditation a fixed time every week, 
so that you are free to vary the daily time when 
needful. 

Modern Biblical study, which is now so 
widely spread, however useful in itself, tends 
to place a difficulty in the way. People are apt 
to get the notion that Bible reading always in- 
volves a study of the Synoptic problem, or 
Jewish eschatology, or the geography of Asia 
Minor, or something else up-to-date and aca- 
demic. Devotional Bible reading, let me repeat, 
involves literally nothing but a longing deter- 
mination to get, through penitence, humility, 
and quiet thought, into closer touch with God. 


XVE MPRAYER ORSOUNTON 


E turn now to the third clause in our 
Lord’s sentence: ‘Knock and it shall be 
opened unto you,” which suggests what I have 
called Prayer of Union. Meditation requires 
the intellectual faculty not to be excluded but 
to be kept rather in the background as com- 
pared with the free play given to the will and 
the emotions in their reaching after God. But 
Prayer of Union, or contemplation, is a further 
stage in which the intellectual faculty is not 
allowed to assert itself at all. “Commune with 
your own heart and in your chamber, and be 
still.” That exhortation is not fully met either 
by petitions or meditations. There is some- 
thing else, which it is exceedingly difficult to 
explain in words, and which can really be learnt 
by nothing but practice and experience, built 
upon the basis of true penitence and humility. 
If I were to ask a musician to explain what 
method I must adopt to gain a deep inner under- 
standing of the meaning and glory of a sym- 
phony of Beethoven, he would not find it easy. 
But obviously he would begin his explanation 
58 


PRAYER OF UNION 59 


by telling me that first of all I must listen in 
silence. And yet though that is obvious in the 
case of music, it is not at all obvious to many 
Christians in the case of spiritual contact with 
God. 

This subject has often been written about. 
It is the burden of a large number of medieval 
books on the spiritual life. It has been called 
Quietism, and other bad names. It is an im- 
portant element in the religious practice of the 
Society of Friends. And it has recently been 
revived within the Church. But there is still 
room, perhaps, for a restatement of it, if only 
to guard against mistakes. For there are some 
bad mistakes into which it is easy to fall. 

It may be well to suggest a definition as a 
asin tor study.) braver ot.) Union! or or 
silence, or of contemplation—it has many 
names; some writers have called it “interior 
prayer’—is an attitude towards God in which 
intellectual thought and emotional feeling are 
kept in abeyance, the will is exercised in keep- 
ing them so, and the love of the whole being is 
free to unite itself with the love of God. The 
last may be expressed metaphorically by saying 
that love silently and persistently knocks at the 
door, that it may be opened for God’s love to 
stream out. 


XVII. MISTAKES 


ND first, what to avoid. Three mistakes 
are often made, especially by beginners, 

in attempting the practice of contemplation. 
1. We saw that in meditation all artificiality 
must be avoided. And the same is even more 
urgently necessary here, for artificiality is so 
closely akin to self-consciousness; and nothing 
is more fatal to the free play of humble and 
penitent love. When a person first begins this 
kind of self-training, he is at once troubled 
with the feeling—“I am now doing something 
really advanced in the Christian life, something 
novel and exciting, something that most Chris- 
tians do not even attempt.” But the moment 
the attempt becomes a pious pose, its value is 
instantly blotted out, and the door between the 
soul and the divine Reality is locked and 
double-locked by man himself, with no possi- 
bility of opening. Instead of doing something 
really advanced and novel, he is away back in 
the very old and very elementary condition of 
self-love, pride, and foolishness, the condition, 

in fact, of the Pharisee in the temple. 
60 


MISTAKES 61 


2. But some who free themselves, by God’s 
help, from self-love and pride, do not quite 
escape the foolishness. They fall into a mis- 
take arising from their very anxiety to gain the 
blessing that they seek. They imagine that the 
results of contemplation must take a striking 
or unusual form, a wonder, a thrill, a sweet- 
ness; and in their eagerness they strain after 
it with a mental, and even physical, tension. 
Some even adopt physical means to carry 
themselves away from their surroundings; 
they gaze at a crucifix, or an altar, or its 
lights, or a stained widow, or a picture. Of 
course any of these may suggest material for 
helpful meditation. But if they are used asa 
means of inducing a process which is difficult 
to distinguish from hypnotic self-suggestion, 
they have no more right to be considered as a 
legitimate method of Christian contemplation 
than crystal gazing. I think it should be clear 
that this is artificiality appearing in another 
guise, and one which may do great injury to 
a nervous, highly strung temperament. It is 
just such a temperament which lends itself most 
readily to the mistake. One of the commonest 
objections to religion is that it is merely a 
matter of temperament; and mistaken enthu- 
siasm of this kind, which is as strictly artificial 


62 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


as alcoholic excitement, gives a serious handle 
to the charge. As St. Theresa said, “From silly 
devotions God deliver us!’ And in the same 
spirit of common sense Ruysbroek advises 
learners to adopt for contemplation any physi- 
cal posture that will best make for quiet of 
mind and body, that neither mind nor body may 
intrude itself and interrupt the interior com- 
muning. He recognizes that some people can 
contemplate best when walking about, or 
standing, or kneeling; but he himself found it 
easier, and therefore simpler and more helpful, 
to sit. Anything will do, provided that it helps 
to reduce the physical element in contempla- 
tion to a minimum. 

3. A third mistake, closely allied to the last, 
is to expect, or even to want or hope for, 
visions, trances, ecstasies or the like. These 
were related of many of the medieval saints, as 
also of Christians in earlier days; and they are 
by no means unknown in modern times. But 
those who have written about contemplation, 
and recorded their experiences, are unanimous 
in declaring that such experiences are never to 
be sought for, and cannot be gained by trying. 
I will not attempt to discuss the psychology of 
them. That branch of study is still far too 
young to afford safe ground for any definite 


MISTAKES 63 


decision as to how far they are pathological, the 
results of temperament or of something in the 
nature of self-suggestion, and whether, or to 
what extent, they are an immediate divine gift. 
I want only to make clear that in either case 
they lie entirely outside the limits of our self- 
training. 


XVIII. THE GIVE-AND-TAKE OF LOVE 


F we are right, then, in assuming that these 

three things—self-satisfaction, self-excite- 
ment, and the seeking for abnormal experiences 
—are bad mistakes to be resolutely avoided, 
what can be said as to the true nature of con- 
templation or Prayer of Union? It has two 
aspects, which are strictly and literally mutual, 
and inconceivable each without the other. 

1. Recall what was said in Chapter VI 
about Influence, the influx, the flowing in, of 
personality into personality, the interpenetra- 
tion of souls. Now, when some one exercises 
a strong influence over me, I may recognize 
the fact if I think about it, I may realize that 
when I speak or act or think in a particular 
way it is because he has influenced me. Again, 
I may, by a conscious act of will, put myself, 
or allow myself to be drawn, under his in- 
fluence. And once more, I may experience a 
feeling of pleasure in doing so, But what is it 
in me which has actually received his influence? 


It is not my thinking consciousness, nor my 
64 


THE GIVE-AND-TAKE OF LOVE 65 


will, nor my feelings, but my whole Self, my 
Ego, to its deepest depths and its fullest con- 
tent, not differentiated into its several aspects. 
This need not be described as my subconscious- 
ness, or subliminal or supraliminal conscious- 
ness, because we do not know enough about 
it to give it any such spatial name. It is better 
to call it simply my Ego, or my spirit. 

And the reception of God’s influence, or in 
other words the influx of His Spirit, is 
analogous to this reception of human influence. 
One of the two aspects of contemplation is that 
in silence, with no striving of thought or will 
or feeling for the purpose of obtaining an 
effect, but with a concentration of the whole 
being, not on a purpose but on a Person, you 
receive His Spirit into your spirit; your spirit 
lies open and susceptible to the influence of 
His Spirit. When you afterwards think about 
it, you know that it has been so by its effects 
upon you; you can then feel and enjoy the 
tremendous fact of His Presence growing, 
deepening, brightening—how can language 
describe it?-—as the years go by. And you 
find also that when you turn to the other 
methods of prayer that we have thought of, 
petition, intercession, praise, thanksgiving, 
meditation, you come to them enveloped in an 


66 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


atmosphere of God’s Presence which gives to 
all of them an increasing reality. But the very 
act itself, the reception of God’s influence, is 
the reception of what is divine, and what, on 
that account, your human thinking conscious- 
ness cannot possibly grasp. 

It is a matter of perfect peace; no excite- 
ment, or straining, or striving, or contriving; 
and on the other hand no lazy dreaminess or 
hypnotic lethargy. Contemplation can often 
be reached by passing straight on from medita- 
tion. Some of the greatest writers on the sub- 
ject have earnestly advised that as the best way 
of escaping the danger of mere dreaminess. 
You pause so long over a sentence or a thought 
suggested by what you are reading that the 
earthly language begins to fade as the bright- 
ness of His Presence grows. Meditation 
brings you into contact with Reality, and con- 
templation keeps you there. It is letting your 
soul stand in an attitude to receive God. It 
is knocking at the door, and waiting for God 
to open. 

2. The second aspect of contemplation is 
inseparable from the first. Take the words in 
our Communion Office: “Here we offer and 
present unto Thee, O Lord, ourselves.” Our 
mind can think about doing this; our will can 


THE GIVE-AND-TAKE OF LOVE 67 


determine to do it; our feelings can enjoy the 
thought, and the determination. But the very 
act itself, the very offering and presenting, 
which takes place in silent contemplation, 1s 
the work of the Ego, the spirit, the whole Self, 
not differentiated into its several aspects, giv- 
ing itself to God’s Spirit. The Lord says, 
“Behold I stand at the door and knock.” In 
contemplation we realize that He on His part 
is waiting for us to open; and we hear Him 
say, “Is thy heart right, as My heart is with 
thy heart?” 

But what is this mutuality of receiving and 
offering, the method of which I have called 
Prayer of Union? There is only one word for 
it—Love. The method is not dreamy laziness, 
or anything quietistic or hypnotic; it is the 
give-and-take of Love. As St. Bernard puts 
it, it is “God loving Himself [by a love pro- 
ceeding] from man.” 


XIX. FELLOWSHIP 


F it is truly this, it is not selfish, because all 
mankind is one, the instrument of the Self- 
expression of the personal Reality. The prin- 
ciple of representation, of “sympathy,” of 
priesthood, comes into play here as in all other 
methods of prayer. Our Prayer of Union 
works towards the closer union of God with all 
mankind. 

Some members of the Church have recently 
made the attempt to realize the true corporate- 
ness of prayer, by meeting together for the 
purpose, and joining in what has been called 
the Fellowship of Silence. It would be of 
untold value if the silence could sometimes 
be made an opportunity for united contempla- 
tion. There is no reason, in the nature of 
things, why the practice of public worship 
should not be extended to include all the three 
methods of prayer. A group of people unite 
in knocking at the door, and opening to God’s 
knock. And if they really contemplate, really 
meet with God in the give-and-take of Love, 

68 


FELLOWSHIP 69 


they are at the same time mutually pouring 
their influence into each other, and therefore 
drawing each other nearer to God. One word 
of warning is needed. When they first begin 
to try, and probably for some time, they will 
find the difficulty of escaping self-conscious- 
ness much greater than in solitude. But if 
they can overcome that by practice and habit, 
their souls will rise in unison to God. 

Lastly, let it never be forgotten that, as in 
the case of intercession, spiritual communion 
has its necessary complement in sacramental 
communion, wherein, as a united whole, we 
offer ourselves to God in union with Christ’s 
eternal Self-offering, and as a united whole re- 
ceive His Life. It is the sacrament of the 
give-and-take of Love. 

The Christian Church must continue to train 
itself in prayer, thereby drawing all men into 
the vortex of the Love of God, “till we all 
come in the unity of the Faith and of the knowl- 
edge of the Son of God, unto a perfect Man, 
unto the measure of the stature of the fulness 
of Christ.” 


ON INTERCESSION 


OMETHING has been said on this subject 

in the preceding pages; but Intercession 

is a spiritual duty so important, and so little 
practiced or understood by large numbers of 
Christian people, that it will not be out of place 
to deal with it here a little more fully. Prayer 
for others—What does it involve? What are 
its limits? What are its gains? Many ques- 
tions rise to our minds; and we must approach 
them by recalling one or two of the funda- 
mental aspects of prayer in general. All 
prayer is a reaching out after the divine Reality 
which lies at the heart of our being, and at the 
heart of the world. It is a striving, pressing, 
feeling after oneness with God. But it has 
to be remembered that there are countless dif- 
ferent degrees of oneness with God. Take 
an illustration from human life. You are at 
a meeting or conference, and some one gets up 
—a total stranger to you—and makes a speech, 
pressing some point with which you are in 


hearty agreement, or proving some point that 
70 


ON INTERCESSION 71 


you did not see before, and making you agree 
with him. The speaker at once establishes a 
certain degree of oneness between himself and 
you. And any degree of oneness carries with 
it just that degree of admiration or respect. 
But suppose that you get to know him, and you 
find on closer acquaintance point after point on 
which you agree with him; you learn to admire 
his mind and character, and the feeling might 
deepen into devoted attachment, affection, love. 
Every stage in the process means reaching a 
greater degree of oneness. If that is applied 
to our relations with God, the process is the 
Christian life. Some who read this are in far 
closer oneness with God than others. It is not 
simply a question of avoiding wrong things and 
doing right ones; it is something much deeper 
and more wonderful. How, then, is it done? 
In order to find yourself in deeper and deeper 
oneness with your friend, to arrive at devoted 
affection and love, you obviously require fre- 
quent conversations, frequent contact, frequent 
listenings to what he has to say, frequent ex- 
pressions of agreement and oneness, an absence 
of any nervous reserve in letting him see your 
admiration and attachment—not always in 
words, but always in feeling and sympathy— 
a steady growing and intensifying of mutual 


72 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


intimacy. And towards God all that increase in 
approach and intimacy is reached by prayer. 

Here we have to do only with petitions for 
other people. What part will they play in our 
growing oneness with God? When we ask for 
something, and get exactly what we want, it is 
very nice and satisfying. And it happens very 
often, as all the saints of God can tell you. If 
free spirit, the spirit of man, can to some ex- 
tent control the forces of Nature and adapt 
them to his purposes, can we say less of the 
Spirit of God? If man can do many things, 
consciously and with purpose, in answer to 
petitions, can God do less? The difficulty seems 
to begin when we ask for something and do not 
get it. We must remember that God has His 
purposes, not only for our little individual 
lives, but great and untraceable purposes for 
the human race as a whole. Some of those 
purposes He cannot fulfill without our co- 
operation, because we possess the extraordinary 
power of voluntary choice, a will which is able 
to help or hinder Him. Every time we offer 
Him a genuine prayer, what is the effect? We 
do not force or persuade Him to give us what 
we ask for. But we get into touch with His 
power. His power is there, ready to be used, 
and in those things in which He needs our co- 


ON INTERCESSION 73 


operation we voluntarily set it in motion, so 
to speak. Very often we cannot see in what 
direction our prayer has its effect; we can only 
feel sure that we are contributing something 
towards making the divine energy active and 
fruitful. As regards our immediate request 
His answer to our prayer may be the answer, 
No; but every prayer does something towards 
the fulfillment of the world-wide purposes of 
God; somehow, somewhere, we are making a 
difference in the life of mankind. It needs a 
very broad outlook and. a very earnest desire 
for God’s glory to make us go on praying when 
we do not appear to be answered. 

But we can always comfort ourselves, not 
only by sheer faith that we are accomplishing 
something in the world, but by pointing to two 
definite effects of which we can be quite cer- 
tain. On the one hand, by asking for anything 
in humble and loving dependence, we can ex- 
press our relationship of children to a Father. 
That is to say, our intercessions for those who 
are known and dear to us, or known and not 
dear, or not known at all, quite apart from their 
results to us or them, are an offering to God; 
every true prayer that we breathe is a transla- 
tion into words or thoughts of the inarticulate 
language of love, and has the same effect as 


74 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


would be reached if we were able to go on and 
on saying with real earnestness and meaning 
the two words, “our Father.” If more of His 
children could only realize that they can throw 
themselves into prayer—on any subject, at any 
time or place, in any attitude, with any words 
or no words—for His delight, He would get 
so much more from them than He does. On 
the other hand, nothing that we can do to give 
Him delight fails to react upon ourselves. To 
be in touch with His power by any sort of pe- 
tition contributes to our own spiritual growth. 
If people live for some time in a foreign coun- 
try they not only learn the language and catch 
the accent, but gradually change to some ex- 
tent in manner and habits and even in appear- 
ance, and become like those around them. And 
if your heart travels frequently to the Presence 
of God, and you talk with Him, you will 
gradually be transformed into the same Image. 
The one thing you want to get and keep is con- 
tact, to be naturally and easily in touch. 

Let us now look more particularly at our 
prayers for other people. Our requests for 
our own personal needs so easily slide into - 
selfishness or self-centeredness, or self-pity, 
that to pray for others is a safer and surer 
method of putting ourselves in tune with the 


ON INTERCESSION 75 


great love of God. And to be in tune with His 
love means the same as to be in touch with 
His power. God is love, and any expression 
of our love in intercession is, by its very nature, 
cooperation with Him. We are contributing 
to the world-wide forward movement towards 
the satisfying of His love. When we come 
to look at the matter closely most of us find that 
what makes our intercessions so feeble and 
lifeless is chiefly that we have not reached that 
love and longing for the souls of men which 
can put us really into tune with the love of 
God. Our love and longing are not to be 
simply the natural affection that we feel for 
those nearest and dearest to us. We can easily 
be moved to utter fervent petitions for them 
when any special need arises. The love that is 
most akin to God’s love, and which therefore 
does the most work, is the love for human souls 
as such; the longing that that which is made in 
His Image may grow nearer to His fullness. 
That kind of love, while it naturally comes 
easiest for our family and close friends, can be 
extended in genuine reality to reach out to all 
men. 

And that thought, in turn, can afford us a 
welcome relief from a difficulty felt by many 
which has already been referred to in Chapter 


76 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


XII. Imagine the millions upon millions of 
things that we should have to pray about if we 
started praying for all the needs of the world. 
How are we to pick and choose? And how 
many things ought we to pray for? I have met 
some people who were anxious to pray well, 
and were really burdened by the feeling of the 
vast number of petitions that they ought to 
offer but cannot for want of time. What are 
we to do? Well, one thing is quite clear, that 
only God can know the individual needs of 
every one, and therefore if the value of our 
prayers depended upon our knowledge of in- 
dividual needs, there are millions of human 
beings who would never be prayed for at all, 
and unnumbered millions of things that human 
beings need, but of which no praying person 
knew anything. The working out of God’s 
purposes is dependent on our codperation, but 
not on our knowledge. What we have to do 
is to love the souls of men so truly that we 
really and deeply desire the fulfillment of 
God’s purposes for every one of them. And 
if we could abide permanently in that state of 
desire, we should have no need to offer any de- 
tailed petitions at all. God knoweth what every 
one in the world hath need of before we ask 
Him, He does not require us to give Him 


ON INTERCESSION a i 


information on the subject. It is not knowl- 
edge that is wanted; it is the conscious, vol- 
untary state of desire; it is the being in tune 
with His love, and therefore in touch with 
His power. But because our minds are unable 
to abide consciously more than a very short 
time in that condition, we find it a help to 
resort to details; they are specimens, tangible 
points, handles by which the mind keeps its 
hold on the universal desire. And I am sure 
that we ought, in our self-training, to practice 
the large desire, and try to make it play a 
much bigger part in our prayers than it usually 
does, and only turn for help to details from 
time to time when the mind needs them. That 
is exactly what we have in our Lord’s pattern 
prayer. It is not simply words to be said, it is 
a summing up of the whole method and pro- 
gram of our petitions. First He illustrates in 
three different ways the great universal desire 
for the working out of God’s purposes in the 
souls and bodies of men: “Hallowed be Thy 
Name”; “Thy Kingdom come”; “Thy Will be 
done.” And then He gives four specimens of 
detailed petitions that we can use as helps: 
“Give us this day our daily bread”; “Forgive 
us our trespasses”; “Lead us not into tempta- 
tion”; “Deliver us from evil.” All four are 


78 SELF-TRAINING IN PRAYER 


intercessions because the words “us” and “our” 
include all mankind—at least they ought to if 
we practice the kind of prayer of which the 
Lord’s prayer is an example and guide. They 
add literally nothing to the threefold universal 
petition which precedes them, in fact they do 
not nearly cover it; they are a wise and merci- 
ful concession to the limitations of the human 
mind, and show us that we are justified in men- 
tioning details in our intercessions provided 
they are kept in their proper place. To pray 
well is not the same as to pray regularly, or 
often, or carefully, or beautifully, or diligently. 
It is to desire continuously—“without ceasing,” 
as St. Paul says—that the desire of God may 
be achieved. 
(1) 


Ana 
“ai , 





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